Firefly cap has no battery and is meant for indoor light harvesting

[Michael Ossman] wrote in to show off his newest project. He calls it the Firefly cap, which we think is something of a play on words. You can see that it serves as the cap of a Mason jar, but it also uses a supercap instead of a rechargeable battery.

Posts about firelfly jars go way back. And [Michael] mentions that a similar firefly project was his first embedded project. The concept uses LEDs suspended in a jar. When a light detector senses the target level of darkness, the lights inside begin to twinkle like their insect namesakes.

We like this design for two reasons. It’s aimed at collecting light in an indoor environment so you don’t have to worry about placing it in the sun. And it uses a super capacitor instead of a battery so this should truly keep going and going without wearing out the energy storage components. We also like the fact that although this is a Kickstarter project, everything you need to build your own is already available at the Github repository.

I really dont understand why hes needing $65,000 to start making simple kits. Shit i could make this design in a night send it out to batchPCB make 300 of them and get all the parts for less than $3000 easy

I personally have been wanting to build one for a long time. quick calc – a 25F,2.7V cap (maxwell) is 4.1$ (mouser) and stores 91 joules of energy. a 3V, 30ma (bright) LED can stay constantly on for 17 minutes on this charge. if you run it with some kind of flickering so its on only 25% of the time, it will run for about an hour (a little overhead for chip doing the flickering). So that’s about 4$ per LED per hour. if you use his design, for 35$ of parts (minus PCB) you can get impressive results.

forgot to say – I HATE seeing these cheap solar “garden lights” , that are so environmentally friendly except they use a cheap ni-cad battery for storing energy , which dies after 6 months and then usually the thing goes in the trash.

hold on – selling an overpriced product is not a scam. it’s just business. even more so when the source is open and you can see the cost of manufacturing! he looks like an honest person, maybe not the sharpest businessman. but you learn from mistakes. he’s one of ours and throwing this kind of dirt should be frowned upon.

Ummmm….YES! yes it is…. How many dishonourable things get dismissed wit (deliberate typo: sounds like Mit) the glib: “it’s just business”
Kinda like “it’s just paedophilia, you do understand they really do LOVE the children”

From the infallible wikiP:
“When accomplices are employed, they are known as shills.”